Memory skills mediating superior memory in a world-class memorist

ABSTRACT

Laboratory studies have investigated how individuals with normal memory spans attained digit spans over 80 digits after hundreds of hours of practice. Experimental analyses of their memory skills suggested that their attained memory spans were constrained by the encoding time, for the time needed will increase if the length of digit sequences to be memorised becomes longer. These constraints seemed to be violated by a world-class memorist, Feng Wang (FW), who won the World Memory Championship by recalling 300 digits presented at 1 digit/s. In several studies we examined FW’s memory skills underlying his exceptional performance. First FW reproduced his superior memory span of 200 digits under laboratory condition, and we obtained his retrospective reports describing his encoding/retrieval processes (Experiment 1). Further experiments used self-paced memorisation to identify temporal characteristics of encoding of digits in 4-digit clusters (Experiment 2), and explored memory encoding at presentation speeds much faster than 1 digit/s (Experiment 3). FW’s superiority over previous digit span experts is explained by his acquisition of well-known mnemonic techniques and his training that focused on rapid memorisation. His memory performance supports the feasibility of acquiring memory skills for improved working memory based on storage in long-term memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory skill
• superior memory
• memorist
• encoding process
• time constraint

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Feng Wang (FW) for his patience in the effortful experiments, and to Len Hill, Yi Zhu, Xianchun Li, Xiangdong Yang, and Yongdi Zhou for their valuable help and comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 31371052 to Yi Hu and the FSCW/Conradi Endowment Fund of the Florida State University Foundation to K. Anders Ericsson.